Finalist 2010

13 December 2012

Tastes like a dead dog

OK, that's unfair of me: I thought of the title before opening the beer. But I'm not much of a fan of the beer from Sharp's -- MolsonCoors's Cornish operation -- nor of telly chef Rick Stein who put his signature on this one, nor of Chalky's Bite, the other beer named after his late mutt, so I wasn't expecting to be impressed by its little brother Chalky's Bark.

But really, it's not a bad beer. Yes it's massively overcarbonated making it difficult to taste anything in it at first, and at its core there's a watery nothingness where I think I'm within my rights to expect some sort of malt-derived weight, especially at the not-insubstantial ABV of 4.5%. But the centrepiece of the flavour is a lovely bittersweet lemon that teeters a little towards washing up liquid yet never quite gets there, fortunately. That the promised centrepiece of the flavour is ginger, of which I can detect no trace whatsoever, bothers me not in the slightest.

Chalky's Bark is a perfectly acceptable sunny day quaffer, as long as you let the dog blow off some of his trapped gas first.